Justice tastes pretty bad

So, last Friday I had my first experience with Jury Duty, and let me tell you, any excitement I felt at participating in this kick-ass country’s flawed but awesome justice system completely evaporated upon my arrival in Daley Center’s 17th floor. Now, it wasn’t the huge, lecture hall-sized room filled with zombified people of every race, age, and gender (that was inspiring, actually; united in boredom) that did it. Nor was it the knowledge that every agonizing minute spent waiting around doing nothing was another minute added to my (not reimbursed) parking bill.

It was the food.

“Bring plenty of change for vending machines” has such a…defeated ring to it, but I assumed there’d be something worth eating when I saw their rotating, refrigerated vending monstrosity. Sandwiches, perhaps. An apple. But ah, no, every shelf was reserved for bottled water, soda, and juice! All this next to the drink vending machine. On the other side of the worst party room ever was a machine filled with more standard fare: Krunchers chips, those damn tubes of powdered donuts that liquefy once you bite into them, and the eerie orange peanut butter crackers. I opted for the latter, washing down the vaguely peanutty styrofoam with unhappy gulps of Diet Coke.

Look, Mr. Courthouse Manager, I know that we can’t expect haute cuisine out of the jury area in Daley Center, but I bet you’d get a hell of a lot more people taking their (extremely important!) civic duty seriously if you treated them like, say, human beings with taste buds. Put some fruit and sandwiches in the refrigerated vending machine instead of hawking bottled water. Put up a map of good restaurants nearby, since we have a limited amount of time for lunch and may not be familiar with the area

Hell, have a bowl of mints.

Maybe then you wouldn’t have so many citizens trying to BS their way out of Jury Duty once a year.